Is Android still open now that Google has postponed the source code release of Honeycomb, version 3.0 of the mobile operating system? I've been reading a whole boatload of articles and blog posts on the web claiming Android is no longer open, but it seems like very few people seem to actually understand what 'open' really means when it comes to the GPL and the Apache license. Here's a short primer.

I'm pretty sure that the copy right for most parts of Android (except the Linux kernel) are owned by Google. As such, they are under no obligation to release the source. Upto 2.3 they have done it, but for 3.0 they have decided not to do it yet, and since they own the copyright, the license does not apply to them. It just applies to others who decided to use code that Google wrote.

Same way how QT is licensed under a GPL & a commercial license. You can't take the QT's GPL code and release it under a commercial license, but QT can do it because they own the code.